Midlife-Crisis Blue Lagoon (Cast Away)

As some late Sunday evening telly I watched Cast Away last night (BBC1), the Tom Hanks opus where one ends up empathising more with a hapless Wilson basketball than Mr. Method Actor himself.

Cast Away tells the not true story of a Fed Ex manager who lives by the clock who has a big plane crash and washes up on a desert island where, get this, he has loads of time! Tom Hanks is Chuck Noland, a Fed Ex company man through and through, pager in one hand this man thinks, breathes, godammit sweats Fedex. And he's all wrapped up in chunkiest knitwear highlighting his equally chunky frame. He's such a company man that when his pager goes he leaves his big family Christmas dinner because he absolutely must fly to wherever in a Fed Ex Tristar. So this guys a real can-do kinda guy. We see him shouting at his Muscovite employees, and we see him shouting at them in Red Square as they do an impromptu open air Fed-Ex parcel sort to make the last flight out. The next time he's shouting because coconuts are falling off the trees. More of that later. Back to Fed Ex because you can't move for Fed Ex in this film. Its omnipresent. There are even some postal jokes. 'Take 5 days to get there and we'll be US Mail' and 'you wanna be on time fly UPS!' says the pilot of the doomed plane. The crash is karma for his irony. The ironies on him as all the parcels are late so he may as well be US Mail. There are loads of laughs here. They keep on coming when Chuck Noland has his fateful crash where everyone dies except him. Indeed he doesn't suffer a scratch. He's then washed ashore on a South Pacific island. What to do next? He doesn't find any water for a day which was a nice touch, and he eats a coconut. He find a torch on a dead pilot, and cuts his feet and hands and legs on coral and doesn't get infected. Its amazing. Its as though he has antibiotics or something to ward of the sickeningly rapid infection that usually occurs in the tropics from untreated coral cuts. You see coral is often living when it cuts your skin, and then it gets in the wound, and the air is hot and moist and before you know it your foot is the size of, for want of comparison, Wilson.

Not Chuck. He's so confident in his natural healing process that he uses some bubble wrap as a dressing and his legs don't drop off and he can still walk and doesn't get gangrene. The bubble wrap comes from the parcels washed up on the beach. And as this is a non-stop thrill fest we just can't wait to see what's in the parcels. There's Wilson the ball that becomes his best mate, and some ice skates that form a cutting/dental tool and a ballroom dress with a mesh ideal for fishing (who'd have thought) and ice skates! Ice Skates! On a desert island… but they look sharp and… and then when we watch him trying to light a fire for 10 minutes (36 hours in the film).

Four Years Later – and he's Stig of the Dump, and all that chunkiness is now skinny, and he has a caveman beard and curly hair. Ha-ha! His cave is daubed with neanderthal paintings and what-not. All in all he's regressed quite a way.

In the end he builds a raft, and loses Wilson (oh no, I ruined the one interesting plot line) and obviously gets rescued. In a nice twist his wife has remarried and had a child and so that relationship is dead. But this is a Robert Zemickis film so you just know there's some schmaltz coming up. You see good ole Chuck didn't open all the parcels on the beach. No, he was a good employee and kept one sealed and the thought of delivering it 'kept him alive for four years'. Any sane man would have opened it. After all, there could have been a solar powered satellite phone in it which would have saved us all a load of bother.

So in the final frame he's delivered the phone to some bird we saw at the beginning of the film who's a sculptor who coincidentally created a sculpture just like the logo of Fed Ex and incredibly didn't infringe their copyright. Chuck sees this and likes what he sees and he's now standing on a crossroads literally in the middle of nowhere wondering what to do next though hints have been dropped that he'll be heading back up the dusty track to the sculptress who we know is divorced because we saw her Fed Exing her divorce papers at the beginning of the film which like the beginning of this sentence really does feel like it was four and a half years ago.

Oliver Reed made a film called Castaway which was much better. It was based on a true story and that true story may have been written by Oliver Reed. I can't remember really, it doesn't really matter but the point was that Oliver Reed's character created the perfect Oliver Reed Desert Island, not unlike a Mid-Life Crisis Blue Lagoon. He put up an advert for single women to come and live with him on a desert island he owned in the South Pacific and not only did he get responses but they were hot too. Oliver Reed ends up running a South Pacific fiefdom where he drinks rum all day and the women, who either loathe him or just despise him, hang around with their knockers out.

Cast Away is rubbish and Castaway is also rubbish but Castaway has the benefit of Oliver Reed and female tits and Cast Away has Tom Hanks as a caveman. It's a no brainer really. (Look there's a nipple on the video cover!)

 

Zeitgeist and why Internet Conspiracies drive me nuts

The really serious issue that I have with internet films is their unbalanced nature. Good journalism takes a topic, investigates it, then interviews two groups, those who support and those who are against. It then draws a conclusion.

Zeitgeist used the internet as its source material which is a major problem in terms of reliability. I mean if I told you that I was going to make a documentary using Wikipedia as my sole source then (hopefully) you'd think I was mental. Wiki is renowned for being an unreliable source.

So I had a real problem with Zeitgeist other than my opinion that it was a waste of an hour of my life.

 

1. Unattributed narration
   

   The film opens with some monologue about how the world is a big joke or whatever. Then at the end a name comes up. Like Fred Blogs. There's no title. Its just a bloke speaking and because he's the introduction to the film it gives his speech further gravitas. But who is he? For all I know he's a mentalist from Speaker's Corner who's been given a global stage.
   

   This technique was used throughout the film, a weakening influence every time it was used.
   

2. Quickfire video editing
   

   Interspersing images of 9/11 with atomic tests from the 1950s is meaningless. Unless you're trying to show me that explosions are quite cool, or that wars kill people, or whatever. Or that 9/11 is somehow comparable to Cold War nuclear testing. Or is 9/11 a metaphor for Cold War MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). Or that 9/11 is the new Cold War?
   

3. Religion is a tool to rule the masses
   

   Well done, you learnt something about religion in medieval Europe. I'd also argue that money sets the masses free. Religion also gives hope to the hopeless. Its easy to slate Christian fundamentalism when you think of fat Americans in the mid-west but it's a little different telling a DCR refugee that their entire belief structure is there to repress them not save them.
   

4. The 9/11 Truth: Its an opinion not the truth. Basing your thesis on other internet documentaries is not sound. Nor is it sound to use supporting evidence taken from news sources who you then go on to criticise for being controlled by the government/corporations/aliens. Using eyewitness reports isn't that reliable either as what people hear and see is often very different from what actually happens. Early reports of the Mumbai attacks had 100 gunmen running wild, that was reduced to 10.
   
5. and on heavily edited quotes such as that of coroner at Shanksville where United 93 crashed who is widely quoted as saying there were no bodies there… (because they had been vaporised by the impact – that's the part people naysayers miss out). As for the architects of the towers. The building was designed with an impact of a Boeing 707 hitting the face of the tower and not slicing through a corner.
   
6. The insinuation that 7/7 was an inside job, whilst being grossly offensive, neatly left out the attempt at a repeat bombing two weeks later when there wasn't a drill being conducted.
   
7. Listing all the terrorist attacks against the US and suggesting that somehow these were instigated by the US government. Pan Am 103. Why would the US not only bomb its own airline two days before Christmas, but also target an airline in financial trouble. Yeah, lets make Pan Am, icon of the US airlines go bust.
   
8. Banking. I didn't bother watching this bit as all I need do is read a paper or walk down the street to see the effects of the collapse in our banking sector. Its easier to portray them as the villains of the piece (the global conspiracy) when they're rolling in money. When they've been part or fully nationalised it's a less compelling argument. Royal Bank of Scotland [UK gov has a majority share], HBOS [Halifax Bank of Scotland] and Lloyds TSB are part nationalised. Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley are fully nationalised.
   

 

I like to use this article to rebuff the oh so tedious 9/11 conspiracy theories: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1227842.html

I would also highly recommend 'The Power of Nightmares', a BBC documentary from about 2004:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares

If you want the ultimate 9/11 conspiracy film then look up 'Loose Change'. This is another 2 hours I've lost for good plus add another hour for raised blood pressure.

I think that, conspiracy bullshit aside, this is what Zeitgeist was aiming at – that it is fear that provides the impetus for many foreign and domestic policies.

I've also read and seen interviews where the argument is that sometimes people need to have something or someone to blame when something bad happens. How can it be that the mighty US of A can be brought to its knees by some crazy nutjobs with some box cutters? Yet that's what happened.

Personally I reckon the 9/11 Commission Report was so Republican because Bush's government was embarrassingly poor in preventing it. Any PM who had let something like that happen and admitted so would have had to resign. 9/11 went on to provide GWB with a pretext to invade Iraq. It also made him one of the most unpopular US Presidents in history. That's notwithstanding his single-handed destruction of the US economy.

My final issue with the global conspiracy is this:            So what?

What does it matter? Really? Do you think if we take the blue pill (like The Matrix) and see the real truth, that it will make things any better? Since these global puppet masters are all but invisible and yet have their fingers in every pie we could be chasing ghosts forever and still never find them.

How about this for a contradiction? Zeitgeist accuses religion of being a tool to control the masses. Their message professes to there being a higher invisible power that rules the world. Its evil and its greedy and it controls the world at its whim. Nobody knows who this power is, nor is there any proof that it exists and yet there it is. Now call me blasphemous but that sounds like a whole new religion. In essence, global conspiracy theorists are a very modern 21^st Century internet fundamentalists.

They've founded a new religion. Congratulations.

Not one I believe in